Antidote to Burnout

Foundations for houses in HCMC...

I have previously posted about leaning or tilting houses in Ho Chi Minh City here.  There have been several recent Vietnamese news articles about houses adjacent to rivers collapsing, and there have been several stories lately about the collapse of large projects.  The reasons for the collapse of large projects are always very complicated and in many cases never resolved.  For houses, however, it is usually easy -- does the house have a strong enough foundation?  And the houses that have collapsed into rivers usually suffered erosion of the river bank, undermining the house foundation.

There are many new townhouses and villas under construction in the urban infill area of Nhiêu Lộc south of Phan Xich Long Street along the Thị Nghè canal.  This area used to be a wetlands area, as shown in this picture from 1972:

This condition is the norm for most areas of TP. Hồ Chí Minh away from the center of the city.  The north side of the Phú Nhuận District and most of the Bình Thạnh District looked like this prior to 1975, even though these districts are close to the city center.

Nevertheless, strong foundations for houses are possible in these areas with short reinforced concrete piles, and almost all new townhouse or villas construction in HCMC feature these piles.  Here is a video showing the shoving of these piles into the ground:

The hydraulic pile drivers used to shove these piles into the ground are relatively small and fit into the narrow four-meter wide lots typical in the urban areas of Saigon.

Once the piles have been driven, the foundation is excavated around the piles and the tops of the piles are cut off to the base of the foundation grade beams.

Pile tops are marked with yellow circles above.  Notice how mucky the top layer of soil is.

New sewer line outside our front door...

Concurrent with the extended rainy season we seem to be experiencing, workers came to tear up our hẻm (lane) and replace the storm sewer line.  The existing line was not large enough to accommodate the torrential rains, resulting in minor flooding at times.  Therefore the new line is welcome, although it has contributed to very messy conditions outside our front door (and tracked into the house) at times.

In addition to storm drainage, the line also takes the sewage from each of the houses on the hẻm.  Each house has (or is supposed to have) a septic tank under the house which at least takes out the solids prior to drainage into the sewer line.  However, I have rarely seen any pumpers in the neighborhood removing sludge from these tanks, so it is likely that many of the house septic tanks are no longer functioning properly.

After the old line is removed, the new line is installed at a fairly shallow depth, as was the old line.  I never saw the water line, which indicates it is lower than the sewer, which is contrary to safe practice.

The result has been a muddy mess of mud and continuing sewer effluent.

Collector basins are established about every five to eight meters along the hẻm.

Each house sewer discharge (which includes large quantities of storm drainage at times) drains to these collector basins.  Therefore each home owner was required to have his house sewer line rerouted as necessary to the new collector basins.

The collector basins have a concrete cover that also allows hẻm storm drainage into the basins.

The contractor should be back soon to install new paving throughout the hẻm.

Constant construction in the hẻms of HCMC

Kevin over at SaigonNezumi.com often posts about the constant construction around his house in a hẻm (lane) on the other side of the Phu Nhuan District from where I live.  He is usually concerned about the dust, mud, and noise brought into his house by the nearby construction, not to mention the holes that have been knocked into his walls from the house construction next door.

Constant construction seems to the normal condition of all neighborhoods in Ho Chi Minh City today.  It is a mark of the vitality and upward economy of the country that everyone who owns a house is usually in a position at this time to remodel their house, add a floor, redo the plumbing, replace a roof, add a terrace trellis, or tear down a small house and build a taller house in its place.  It may be [I have no means at this time to substantiate this] that people would rather improve the land plot handed down to them by their ancestors within the city than relocate to the new urban areas.  The local newspapers keep stating that the real estate market for existing homes is stagnant, and it very well may be (judging from the many nhà bán (house for sale) signs I see around), but this is definitely not restraining the urge to improve one's residential property.

Everyday, I hear hammering, sawing, and machinery sounds entering my home office, but I have learned to tune them out.  And certainly I do love construction anyway.  Here is a current sampling (all photos taken from my roof terrace) of the visible construction going on around my house (nonvisible meaning interior work that I can hear but not see):

An existing house that was gutted and thoroughly remodeled, including a new roof.

A roof being replaced (in addition to a full-gut remodel below), and a new house beyond that.

A large building being demolished.

and a new building off in the distance.

Although it is a few kilometers away downtown, it has been interesting to watch this new TV tower under construction off in the distance:

The tower is only half-way up so far.

Certainly the construction industry in Vietnam is thriving -- for both large companies and the small neighborhood companies working on the projects in the hẻm.

For old nostalgic U.S. Navy C.E.C. officers only:

My blog service, Typepad, gives me information daily on how many page hits the blog receives the previous day.  In addition, I can also see what kinds of Google searches people have done to find the blog.  However, I cannot see who has made the searches.

Sometimes, reviewing these Google searches gives me ideas for topics to cover.  Some of these items are very particular to some shared experience the searcher and I may have had.  Lately, there have been several searches for "OICC" and "Dang Duc Sieu".  There are not many people in the world that would have interest in searching on those terms.  Those terms are common primarily to those of us who served with the U.S. Navy Officer in Charge of Construction, Republic of Vietnam, back in the late 60s and early 70s.  Dang Duc Sieu was the old name of the one-block-long street on which the small hotel was located that housed our 50-or-so naval Civil Engineer Corps officers.

The office building of OICC-RVN was located at 176 Hai Ba Trung Street in downtown Saigon.  OICC had many American and Vietnamese civilian employees.

The building is still located there, in use as an office building for a state-owned Vietnamese company.

Since OICC-RVN was the contracting officer for the cost-plus construction contract with the huge contracting consortium RMK-BRJ, many old RMK senior staff will also be familiar with this building.

Đường (Street) Dang Duc Sieu is now named Đường (Street) Nam Quốc Cang.

This is that street today as viewed from the west on Bùi Thi Xuân Street.  I cannot remember what the name of this street used to be.  The OICC hotel was located mid-block on the right hand (south) side of the street.

The opposite street on the east was called Võ Tánh Street, but is now called Nguyễn Trãi Street.  This photo is taken from Nguyễn Trãi Street viewed west on old Dang Duc Sieu Street.

The hotel would be on the left side in this photo.

This was the hotel in 1972, featuring grenade screens and a generator out in front behind the green sandbags.

My friend and blog reader emem, who worked in another building on this street until recently,  tells me that this hotel was torn down several years ago and replaced with the building shown in the center of the following photograph (not the building with the "KOOL" sign).

The more I look at this photo, however, the more I believe that it is possible that the building was remodeled.  The height is the same, and you can see the old roof-top restaurant and deck at the top of the building.

Here is a view of the houses across the street in 1972:

And here is the house across the street today:

The modernist house that was located to the left of the French colonial villa has either been rebuilt or substantially remodeled.

This was the view in 1972 to the west end of Dang Duc Sieu from the rooftop of the hotel.

This is the view today at the end of Dang Duc Sieu:

The new eight to ten-story buildings along the street and at the end of the street are typical of the new construction in Ho Chi Minh City over the past decade in District 1 neighborhoods.

This neighborhood is located south of downtown (downtown defined as the City Hall area at the west end of Nguyễn Huê Blvd. where it intersects with Lê Lợi Blvd.)  As shown in this photograph taken in 1972 from the hotel rooftop with a telephoto lens,

a railroad yard with the old terminal at the end stretched to the Bến Thành market.  This area is now a long park called 23 September Park, bordered on the right by Phạm Ngũ Lão Street, which is now the center for cheap "backpacker" hotels.

In this photo taken in 1972 just to the left of the previous photo, a water tower, church, and rounded apartment building are shown.

All of those structure still exist, as shown in this photograph taken by my friend emem a couple of years ago.

The new checkered building is Zen Plaza, a retail shopping center.

The Church was on Võ Tánh Street, now renamed as Nguyễn Trãi Street.  This is the modern view of this street at the intersection of the old Dang Duc Sieu Street.

The new high-rise building at the end of old Dang Duc Sieu is a 13 or 14-story building, and is emblematic of the changes occurring throughout Ho Chi Minh City.

More tilting houses

Article from Thanh Nien News 23 March 2007

Deteriorating HCMC bridge poses threat to houses

A recently built overpass in Ho Chi Minh City, which has been in the news for corrupt contractors and poor quality, is continuing to sink into the soil, threatening nearly 40 houses nearby.

The Vanguard Youth Company, an ex-contractor in the Van Thanh 2 Bridge project, quoted a report Friday by city inspectors firm as saying the overpass, built in 2004, was sinking fast.

Reported by Mai Vong - Translated by A.N.O.N

This is actually old news in TP. Hồ Chí Minh -- the bridge has been subsiding for some time and repairs were recently tried, but evidently aren't working too well.  I took a walk in this neighborhood a while back, and here are some photos of houses subsiding along with the bridge.

This house has already been vacated.

Notice the sign flapping in the wind on the balcony -- "Apartment for Lease -- Fully Comfortable"

Houses on the other end of the bridge aren't in much better shape.

Living on a tilt....

I came across this series of houses while on a walk down Đường (Street) Chu Văn An in Quận (District) Bình Thạnh.

It is difficult in this image to figure out what is what is perfectly vertical, but it seems that the taller house on the right is mostly vertical and is holding up the three houses to the left.

What is most interesting to me is that everyone seems to be calmly living with this situation, even though the floors in the middle house must make normal balance a problem.  It also seems that they might have been constructed sequentially as subsidence occurred, and they continued to work around the problem rather than starting over with a better (and more expensive, of course) foundation.

I walked through a three-story house a while back in this district that had been unoccupied for at least a year.  The entire house has settled 20 centimeters from the back towards the front.  The front facade wall at the ground floor had cracks from the stress, although the house structure settled uniformly rather than differentially.  The ground floor, however, was very badly buckled.  The owner of the house said he would clean everything up and fix it up for rental at an attractive price, but he wasn't going to be able to do anything about the settlement.  In my mind, the house is a safety hazard, and I am surprised that anyone would try to rent it out.

I had heard that this district had subsidence problems due to mushy soils.  All soils in the delta surrounding TP. Hồ Chí Minh are alluvial and mucky with a high water table, but this district seems to have the worst conditions judging from some rather famous construction failures (the bridge and highway approaches on Đường Nguyễn Hữu Cảhn are now being reconstructed).

Street widenings....

Đường (Street) Nguyễn Văn Trỗi in Quận (District) Phú Nhuận of Thành Phố (City) Hồ Chí Minh is being widened, as many major streets have over the past several years.  This street is the primary route from Tân Sơn Nhất Airport to downtown Saì Gòn.  After passing the bridge over Rạch (Canal) Thị Nghè into District 3 and downtown, the name changes to Đường Nam Kỳ Khởi Nghĩa.

Therefore the scene is very messy along this street as constructors demolish houses back to the "red line" (limit of the new street right-of-way) and install new pavement, curbs, gutters, and sidewalks.  In the photo above on the right-hand side of the street, the yellow house is yet to be sliced back to the line of the new wall in the right foreground.  The land-use rights owners are compensated for the loss of the use-rights to the land.  (I use the term "land-use rights" because the people's government owns all of the land in Việt Nam -- people and businesses have been allocated rights to use the land, and these rights can be tranferred.)  Beyond the red-line, they can either tear down the remainder of the house or building and build a smaller new building, or keep the remainder of the building and put a new front on it.

In the photo above, notice the house in the center that has been stripped back.  There is only about two meters of house left.  Evidently, the land-use owner has decided to keep the house and put a new front on it.  In the photo below, you can see that furniture and wall decorations remained in the rooms as they cut the house back.  The ground floor already has a new front in order to get the store back in business.

Getting civilian military construction done -- RMK-BRJ [Part 1]

KBR (formerly the M.W. Kellogg Company and Brown & Root, Inc.) is the 4th largest American construction firm today (listed by Engineering News Record) and is a subsidiary firm of Halliburton, well known for its former CEO, now U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.  KBR makes the news regularly under criticism of the non-competitive sole-source contracts awarded to it by the U.S. government for construction work in Iraq.

As pointed out by James M. Carter in his online article "The Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq", the precurser to KBR is the American construction joint-venture RMK-BRJ, formed to perform construction under a cost-plus-award-fee contract for the U.S. Navy in Vietnam in the 60s and early 70s.  Brown & Root, Inc., now part of KBR, was also a key part of RMK-BRJ, also known as The Vietnam Builders (although I never heard that term during the year I worked alongside RMK-BRJ people in 1972).  The other members of RMK-BRJ were also the largest American construction companies at the time, including Raymond International, Morrison-Knudsen, and J.A. Jones Construction.  According to Carter,
"In the process, Vietnam Builders employed 8,600 Americans and over 51,000 Vietnamese. They built six ports with 29 deep-draft berths, six naval bases, eight jet airstrips 10,000 feet in length, twelve airfields, just under twenty hospitals, fourteen million square feet of covered storage, and twenty base camps including housing for 450,000 servicemen and family. In short, they put on the ground in southern Vietnam nearly $2 billion in construction of various kinds of facilities and infrastructure. Military commanders called it the "construction miracle of the decade." (Jones Construction Centennial)."

By my calculation using the ENR Building Cost Index, $2 billion in 1970 terms for construction in Vietnam is the equivalent of $15 billion in American construction dollars today.

As a naval officer assigned to the U.S. Navy Officer in Charge of Construction, Republic of Vietnam (OICC-RVN) from 1971 and 1972, I was privileged to attend the final ceremony in 1972 when Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker turned over the plant, equipment, and material of RMK-BRJ to the Vietnamese government.

While most of the Navy OICC organization was devoted to administering the RMK-BRJ contract, I was fortunate to be assigned to work with Vietnamese construction contractors to build civil projects up and down southern Việt Nam.  But for portions of time, I occupied home and office space in RMK-BRJ construction camps, as well as their home office in downtown Sài Gòn (now occupied by the Diamond Plaza Department Store and office tower) at the corner of Đại Lộ (Avenue) Lê Duẩn and Đường (Street) Phạm Ngọc Thạch in District 1 (Sài Gòn) of Hồ Chí Minh City.  This is what the headquarters looked like in 1972:

and this is what it looks like today:

This is a block south of the Consulate General of the U.S. (former site of the U.S. Embassy).

RMK-BRJ Construction Industry Legacy in Việt Nam [Part 2]

All of the photographs below were taken in 1972 -- click on any of them to enlarge it.

The huge American construction consortium RMK-BRJ was ubiquitous thoughout southern Việt Nam is the 60s and early 70s with its thousands of ochre-colored trucks and equipment.

RMK-BRJ gave construction training and employment to 200,000 Vietnamese in this period, including many women.  These construction workers often became the supervisors and foremen of the Vietnamese contractors I was working with.  In particular, they trained them in modern quality standards and practices, which I think has led to good quality Vietnamese construction today.  This pouring of concrete cylinders for compression-testing is an example:

In looking at the Vietnamese construction industry today, I suspect that much of the RMK-BRJ plant and equipment became the core of the modern-day large Vietnamese construction companies, many of which remain state-owned.  Some of the equipment was probably already being diffused into the local industry to some of the Vietnamese contractors I was working with in 1972, such as this concrete mixer on the Tham Thiện Bridge replacement on Highway QL-51 between Sài Gòn and Vũng Tào on the coast.

Of the many RMK-BRJ construction plants, I understand the the Saigon concrete beam precasting plant is still turning out prestressed concrete beams like the beams used for the La Nga Bridge on Highway QL-20 north of Hồ Chí Minh City.

RMK-BRJ's Saigon Island Depot was the primary depot for most of the imported construction material and equipment entering Việt Nam from America.

RMK-BRJ had all kinds of construction equipment all over southern Việt Nam, including a fleet of water-craft for riverine construction.

RMK-BRJ Construction Legacy in Việt Nam Today [Part 3]

Between 1965 and 1972, the consortium of the four largest American construction companies, RMK-BRJ, built much of the infrastructure of the lines of communications now serving southern Việt Nam today.  All of the photographs below were taken in 1972 -- click on any of them to enlarge it.

The Newport Saigon River depot  (now called Tần Cảng) still offloads ships at the docks next to the Saigon Bridge on the Hà Nội Highway, both of which were also built by RMK-BRJ.

RMK-BRJ completed construction on the by-pass highway (QL-1A) to the west around Saigon in 1972.

This new highway took pressure off traffic in downtown Saigon and now is the key route for transport between the delta to the south and the industrial parks to the north and west.  There are many new office buildings and factories along the bypass highway.

The new bypass highway included four major bridges (Bình Phước, Bình Điền, Bến Lức, and Tân An).

I am not sure what might have happened to this cinema RMK-BRJ built at the Long Bình U.S. Army Post right before the American army left Vietnam at the end of 1972.

Why I am not getting any work done...

This is the current view out of my office balcony door:

The worker is applying the second and final coat of hard plaster on the new house across from me.  Presumably he will drop back down next week to apply paint.

OSHA? What's that?

In the good ole' USA, construction people are very aware of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Admiinistration (OSHA), and the various state agencies regulating worker safety.  On the whole, these agencies and the construction industry together have positively raised worker safety standards and undoubtedly saved many lives.  Similarly, our utility agencies have developed very strong safety standards.

Although I have seen no evidence yet of similar agencies here in Việt Nam, I do see an emphasis on worker safety on large construction sites.  However, there are some practices here to ponder -- such as this plasterer hanging off the side of a new five-story house in my neighborhood of Thành Phố (City) Hồ Chí Minh.

He is wearing a belt attached to the ladder so he can swing out wide to apply this final finish coat of hard plaster, but...gotta have a lot faith in bamboo (the ladder hanging from the roof parapet).

Similarly, I have been pondering the electical power (220-volt) connection to my house and my neighbors.  In the U.S., there are very strict utility rules that place high-voltage lines very high above houses or building, or gets them underground.  Connections to houses are always in inaccessible places.  This is the connection to my house here in HCMC -- I can reach out and touch (if so inclined to fry myself) the connection a foot away from my balcony railing.

Notice that the power lines acoss the lane to the power pole go within reaching distance from my neighbor's balcony.

The connections to my neighbors across the street are similarly accessible.

Architectural photography in Việt Nam is very difficult with all of the power and telecommuncations lines strung along and across the streets and lanes.  Here is a switch box on Đường (Street) Phan Đăng Lưu feeding the mess.

The La Nga River Bridge

In 1970, the U.S. Navy Officer in Charge of Construction RVN awarded a construction contract to a French construction contractor, Eiffel-Asie, to construct a bridge across the La Nga River on national highway QL-20 running north of Sai Gon to Dalat.  This was the first construction contract awarded outside of the work the huge American construction company RMK-BRJ had been assigned.  Subsequently, construction contracts were awarded to Vietnamese contractors as the RMK-BRJ contract was closed out.

I was assigned responsibility to administer the construction of the bridge out of our Long Binh office at the RMK-BRJ Camp.  We regularly drove up national highway QL-1 and QL-20 to observe the construction.

This bridge was to replace a previous French-built bridge bombed by the Viet Cong.

U.S. Army engineers had replaced the dropped span with a Bailey Bridge span, as well as a pontoon bridge for heavy military traffic.

The new bridge spans were constructed with precast prestressed concrete beams furnished to the contractor by the Navy.  These beams were fabricated by RMK-BRJ at their Saigon Island precasting plant.  The French contractor constructed a steel truss "beam launcher" to pull the beams out to the span to be set.

After pulling the beams into the launcher on steel tracks,

the launcher was moved laterally into the position where the beam was to be dropped.

Steel barricades were erected around each pier to protect against mines dropped to drift into the piers to destroy the bridge.

Notice that the piers were solid walls across the width of the bridge.
Here is the bridge at completion.

Rock rip-rap had been added at each of the bridge abutments.

Since returning to Viet Nam, I have desperately wanted to figure out how to get a ride up QL-20 to see if the bridge was still there after the past 35 years.  I luckily received that opportunity two weekends ago when a Vietnamese developer wanted to show me a property north of the bridge on QL-20.  Here is the bridge today:

Notice that the piers are now round columns and beams.  Sometime over the past 35 years, a dam was built on the La Nga River downstream creating a large reservoir which greatly widened the river at the bridge.  It is possible that the river was dredged at this point so the piers had to be reconstructed with new foundations.  The original beams are still there, though, as shown in this picture:

It also appears that the railings were moved outward by extending the bridge deck out to widen the bridge a bit.

This project was an important step for me as a young architect and construction professional.  I am happy to revisit it, and it will stand for me as a reminder that some things will stay the same, other things will go away, and some things will change -- what counts is how it got there and how it will change to meet new needs.